Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Please stay on-topic.

[William L. Thomson Jr.]

On Friday, December 9, 2016 5:06:14 PM EST Gordon Pettey wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 4:36 PM, William L. Thomson Jr. <wlt-ml@××××××.com>
>
> wrote:
> > Java on Gentoo is really not bad, if you are familiar with Java at all.
>
> It's actually quite insane "if you're familiar with Java at all"...

I have been coding in Java since 1.3, going back to 2001 I think.

> Building C and C++ from source is great. 51% of dev-java category is doing
> pointless work.

In what sense? What source/target are pre-compiled jars?

That same thing could be said for perl, python, ruby, and likely others on 
Gentoo. However they tend to be the same, they have no source/target like 
Java.

> 401 ebuilds only have IUSE="doc source" which can almost
> always be fetched from Maven Central

Fetched in another step, this allows it to exist locally. But many are moving 
to Gradle. Maven is a bit old school now, one step beyond ant.

> , and 44 ebuilds have no USE flags at all.

They may be upstream -bins, Sun had a fair amount with no source release. 
Could be the doc/source were omitted on accident or purpose.

> That's just from simple grep results. Given the ugly majority there, I
> don't doubt there's some silliness going on in the remaining 49%. Building
> Java from source to get the exact same jar file every time on a million
> machines when you could just fetch the upstream jar instead is plain stupid.

Really is it the exact same jar? You know what changing source/target does 
right?. Which Gentoo does have some issues there, as it does not use older 
rt.jar when using targets < current JVM version.

https://blogs.oracle.com/darcy/entry/bootclasspath_older_source

Not all jars are the same, not all Java binaries are the same. Tossing a 1.7 
jar into a 1.8 JVM does not really give you any 1.8 benefits. It will run as if 
it was 1.7 in a 1.8 JVM for example.

-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.